How One Kinky Sex Act Is Bringing Us All Together — For The Better

Today, anal sex plays a primary role in the erotic literature of homosexual as well as heterosexual masochism. It has gradually become a common practice not only among gay men, but also lesbians and heterosexual men and women.

According to the work of Sigmund Freud, a man who holds the desire to “be copulated with” characterizes masochism. Later expanding on Freudian theory, Leo Bersani believed there is a strong link between masochism and sodomy: “self-shattering jouissance."

To be able to understand what “self-shattering jouissance” means, first, we have to see Freud’s comments on human sexuality:

“Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering, as a threat to the stability and integrity of self — a threat which perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to survive.”

“We desire what nearly shatters us, and the shattering experience is, it would seem, without any specific content — which may be our only way of saying that the experience cannot be said, that is, belongs to the nonlinguistic biology of human life.”

On the basis of the descriptions above, we could be led to believe that human sexuality is a threat to the self as it destabilizes our ego.

However, as humans, we seek to experience what nearly destroys our ego, the shattering stimuli, in order to become more “human.”

Freud believed this paradoxical condition is then alleviated by masochism.

Thus, this led to the points made by Fantina that masochism functions as a vehicle to fill the “gap between the period of shattering stimuli and the development of resistant or defensive ego structures" and that, therefore, “masochism lies at the very core of all sexuality.”

Sodomy, which they believed to be an essential component of masochism and S&M, also represents an important issue when we talk about human sexuality.